[PLUG] CentOS and RHEL 5

[MJang]

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 10:20 -0700, Michael wrote:

> When is RHEL required?  When support checks for it while examining the system
> in the course of a support call. I am told if they find CentOS rather than
> RHEL they will refuse to provide support.

Yup, there is one package that provides links to the updates of the Red
Hat Network. While it uses yum, the configuration files for the repo are
in a non-standard location.

(of course, this does not include those packages which have to be
reprocessed to remove Red Hat trademarks)

The "disadvantage" of CentOS is the time lag. It takes time to process
the updates provided by Red Hat under the GPL. It takes additional time
to process it into a complete distro. Don't know if it's still true, but
CentOS at least at one time had to use non-Red Hat tools (or something)
to compile the source code packages.

So the packages you see in CentOS are generally some short number of
weeks behind. If there's a critical update, you should be able to pull
the source code packages from ftp.redhat.com and build them as needed.
But that takes time too.

Thanks,
Mike